The Opened Book

06/12/2026

06/09/2026

Oscar Wilde was eventually destroyed by the very society that once applauded him. After being sentenced to two years of hard labor for his private life, he reflected on the crushing weight of public expectation. He saw Victorian morality as a trap designed to hollow out the individual. To Wilde, the only sin was being ordinary for the sake of other people's comfort.

He wrote: There are moments when one has to choose between living one's own life, fully, entirely, completely-or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands.

This choice is rarely a single event. It is a series of daily decisions to either honor your own nature or perform for an audience that will eventually forget you. Wilde reminds us that the world's hypocrisy is a bottomless pit; if you try to fill it with your own sacrifices, you will only end up empty.

Are you currently building a life you enjoy, or a life that simply looks good to others?

05/31/2026

Why do we search for peace in our external surroundings when it can only be anchored within the soul? What happens to our perspective when we stop seeing ourselves as separate from the natural world?

The first peace, which is the most important, is that which comes within the souls of people when they realize their oneness with the universe... and that this center is really everywhere, it is within each of us. — Black Elk

Black Elk was a renowned holy man of the Oglala Lakota who carried the weight of a changing world. He was a cousin of the great warrior Crazy Horse and a survivor of the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre. Despite witnessing the violent upheaval of his culture, his philosophy remained grounded in the idea of the Sacred Hoop—the belief that all life is interconnected and circular.

He taught that when you recognize the center of the universe resides within you, you stop seeking validation or stability from the outside. You become the source of your own tranquility, realizing that the same life force moving through the stars is moving through you.

05/31/2026

Creativity doesn’t start with knowing. It starts with being willing not to know.

In the early stage of any project, your job isn’t to be the expert. It’s to be the learner. Stay open. Ask better questions. Pay attention.

As Einstein said, the “mystical” is where discovery begins. In my experience, that’s true in art, science, and life.

Don’t rush to have answers.

Prepare yourself to receive them.

My forthcoming book, You Are Creative: A Five-Stage Process to Unlock Ideas, Solve Problems, and Find Possibility Everywhere, explores this process in depth. Pre-order it via the link in the comments, and add it to your To-Read list on Goodreads.

05/30/2026

When Welsh beekeeper Margaret Bell died at eighty-two, her son Colin did what beekeeping tradition demanded: he went to her hives and told the bees. "Telling the bees" is a practice dating back centuries in Britain — when a beekeeper dies, a family member must visit the hives and inform them, or the bees will leave or stop producing. Colin stood at his mother's hives the morning of her funeral, knocked three times, and said: "Your mistress is gone." He did not expect what came next. As the funeral cortege left the church and began the three-mile journey to the village cemetery, a swarm of bees — tens of thousands, moving as one dark, humming cloud — appeared above the procession and followed it. For the entire three miles. Maintaining pace. Then hovering above the grave during the service. Then dispersing when it was over.

Local beekeepers and entomologists have offered explanations involving swarm behavior, pheromone trails, and the coincidence of a swarm's timing. None of these explanations satisfied the mourners present, who had watched sixty thousand bees follow a funeral procession with the organized specificity of something that knew where it was going and why. Margaret had kept bees for forty years. She had spoken to them daily, had known their queens by generation, had worked through winter and summer to maintain healthy colonies. The bees she kept for forty years had attended her funeral. Whatever the mechanism, that is what happened.

The story was covered by Welsh and British newspapers, then by international media, and then by the kind of quiet internet permanence that certain stories achieve when they touch something true. People who have never seen a bee and people who have kept them for decades both feel it — the sense that the natural world maintains relationships and honors endings in ways that do not require scientific verification to be real. Margaret was buried in the churchyard of the village where she was born. The bees returned to their hives. In spring they produced the largest honey harvest in Margaret's family's recorded beekeeping history. Colin left a jar on her grave. ��� Share the hive that went to the funeral.